


myriad-flowered

by imgonebye



Category: Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-13
Updated: 2015-08-13
Packaged: 2018-04-14 11:45:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,527
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4563381
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/imgonebye/pseuds/imgonebye
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Mac thinks she just might believe in magic.</p>
            </blockquote>





	myriad-flowered

**Author's Note:**

> This is based on (read: follows the model and a bit of the imagery of) Sappho's "six fragments for atthis," a poem comprised of, as its title suggests, six fragments of Sappho's poetry. You can read it here: http://public.wsu.edu/~delahoyd/mythology/sappho.html  
> All of this is set pre-season 3 (because i havent seen season 3 (it's not on netflix))

**i.**

“Highly opinionated; revolutionary tendencies and suspect _associates_ —” “I think Spall summed you up nicely.”

A mad-hearted, ineffable wish carried up into the darkened heavens—

**ii.**

Mac stubs out her cigarette violently on the edge of the bench as Phryne approaches. Today her orange curls are loose and fly freely around her head in the stinging breeze. She does not look up.

“You know, I think it has been years since I last saw you with your hair like this,” Phryne says, just to test the waters. Between the fiery strands she can see Mac’s lips quirk up in an infinitesimal motion, then fall back. She sits down next to her, clamping her hand over her hat to keep it on her head. “I think it looks lovely this way.”

Mac is still stubbing, grinding her half-smoked cigarette into a powder of ash and tobacco. It would be wrong of Phryne, and perhaps even cruel, to ask about Daisy now, or indeed to apologize again for what was on her part a horribly insensitive—albeit totally innocent—and damnably scarring act. For her part, Phryne cannot imagine staring at such gory remains—the garish and godawful splatter of blood, its negative space limning a horrific tale of agony—of a lover, and especially not in Mac's position, with lovers so hard to come by. But perhaps it would be equally wrong and cruel of her to drop the subject entirely. Would it not be equally insensitive of her—if not more so—to remain silent? Healing needs time, and sometimes that time is best borne in silent contemplation. But surely not for Mac! Perhaps someone like Dot, or Jack, would want some silence for contemplation, with Dot's being for prayer and Jack's for cementing his own emotions—but not Mac, who even now cannot sit in silence or in stillness, as she flicks the last scraps of her pulverized cigarette to the ground and huffs against the noisy wind that rustles the trees and tousles her hair.

"It would be more fitting if it were raining," Mac says, before Phryne can fully gather her words and intentions into something both appropriate and light. There is an obvious dryness behind her voice, the kind that means either that she is entirely done with crying, or about to start crying in earnest. "Daisy always complained about the wind. Not the light breezes, mind you; the wind like this, and how it whipped her clothes and hair around, and how it made her eyes water."

Phryne smiles gently, pushing her own hair back from where the wind has deposited it, tangled in her eyelashes and looped over her nose. Perhaps it would not be so cruel, then. "Had you known each other long?"

"We'd met before I started working for Gaskin. She had accompanied a friend to the hospital—her friend nearly died in childbirth, so she spent quite some time there with her. But we'd only ever been acquaintances before we met at the factory." Mac smiles down at her hands, the kind of soft, watery smile that Phryne recognizes as unconscious, a past happiness manifesting itself despite the present sorrow that belies it. "I don't know how she knew—not that I'm particularly given to, or even good at, masking my . . . _nature_ , but I think I am rather discreet—but she knew. Or at the very least she trusted me enough not to condemn or expose her if she told me."

"I wish you had told me," Phryne says finally. She feels the implications of what Mac has said—Daisy's trust in Mac and her resulting frankness juxtaposing with Mac's trust in Phryne and her resulting silence—and is more than a little bit hurt. Of course this is not about her, but nevertheless—! What could she have done to make Mac think that she is anything other than open-minded and nonjudgmental?

"I planned to," Mac says, finally looking up at her with a softness that Phryne has rarely seen in those blue eyes. A thawing, really. "But Phryne, you must understand: you aren't like the people around you. Where you see a person as simply Human, everyone else qualifies that and diminishes their humanity."

"Well!" Phryne snaps, perhaps a tad discourteously. "Maybe they shouldn't."

"Yes," comes the soft reply. "But neither you nor I have the power to stop them." Mac presses her finger to Phryne's lips when she opens her mouth to protest. "You can't save the world, Phryne. You certainly can't save me from myself."

**iii.**

"Do you ever wish you could live in a moment for eternity?" Phryne asks, sprawled across the grass between Dot and Mac.

Dot fiddles with the picnic basket uncertainly. "Maybe, Miss," she says. "I just don't know if I've found that moment yet."

"I'd rather just capture that moment so I could have it whenever I needed it, " Mac says. A decidedly unscientific fancy strikes her: "Like a photograph in my heart." 

**iv.**

Because Phryne is not particularly given to superstition, and because Mac is a woman of science, neither of the two dares to speak the curious sensation reverberating in her spine as they stare up into the clear summer’s night sky—their bones ring with pagan hymns to Aphrodite; the stars are but tatters in the fabric of the heavens through which divinity shines to bless the fortunate.

What better tribute to pay to whatever powers lie Beyond than this moment: an ephemeral taste of perfection? What sacrifice . . .

. . . the possibility of this moment for eternity . . .

Mac thinks she just might believe in magic. 

**v.**

twining roses into Phryne's hair—miniature blooms spangled pink and white and their soft thorns bend easily under her fingertips, which are coarse from years of working with her hands but precise for exactly the same reason. Waking in a coil of sun-dappled sheets, jolted abruptly by Dot's exclamation, shock and awe, the rising realization of just how far the honorable Miss Phryne Fisher's liberal tendencies go. Tea and scones before she leaves. Silence in her own bed, smaller than Phryne's, which nevertheless feels impossibly large and empty in contrast. Her own sheets are too well starched.

The feeling of arms wrapped around her when she wakes, gradually, the way the sun's rays peek tentatively over the horizon to see if the world is ready for the dawn. Phryne's hair is short and smooth and thick and dark and she touches it often, combs it with her fingers sometimes, other times she twines her fingers through the loose tendrils at the base of Phryne's neck and kisses her. The way Cec and Bert eye her as if she is dangerous, a live wire with sparks trailing from her eyes and heart. The pale indentation of Phryne's spine and the way it twists as she moves to extricate herself from her sheets or her clothing or sometimes (regretfully) from Mac's arms. The wicked quirk of her coquettish lips. The way Phryne says she cannot commit to a man, even when they are apart, and only Mac knows that this is because she has already committed herself entirely to a woman, and this because she knows that men come and go with their capricious affections but Mac's love is like the seasons in that it is mutable but definite. For they have weathered so much together, so much indeed that their bond—be it platonic, romantic, erotic, or whatever its next stage may be—will hold firm.

But above all else the way Phryne declares her love as freely as one woman may declare that she loves another woman in a manner that is both exactly like and nothing like the way a man loves a woman or a woman loves a man. She declares it in the brush of their fingers and the coruscating light in her eyes and the way she curls up into Mac's arms and tangles their legs together and says those three words and illumines the dark early morning. Mac is a woman of numbers and facts and sometimes words are lost on her and also in her because if she cannot quantify a train of thought then sometimes she cannot stop it at all but this is something she can reciprocate. And of course her hyper-rational nature tells her that this is impossible and false, but she feels boneless and brainless when she is with Phryne, a being of pure heart and flesh and light, all thought beaten through her veins in Morse Code. 

**vi.**

Phryne laughed like pealing bells then, the first time they kissed; it was months ago, a second bud from their blooming friendship. She laughed in that way that is too loud and too mirthful, the way that always follows an observable paradigm shift. It is either laugh in the face of the void or be consumed by uncertainty.

Mac said nothing, silent with adoration. Even now, she wishes it were possible for her to grasp that moment, to distill and bottle it and pour herself two fingers of When First I Kissed Phryne on dark, empty nights, to inebriate herself on light and glory.


End file.
